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Cedric Price obituary Cedric Price: 1934–2003 He left few buildings, three books and a great army of admirers. Cedric Price was, in the very best and most creative sense of the word, a researcher and a visionary well ahead of his time. His London Zoo aviary, Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt projects were hugely influential. Here, STEPHEN MULLIN, his chief assistant from 1964 to 1969, remembers both their gestation and (in his extensive notes on p. 118) their extraordinary and greatly loved progenitor. One summer’s day in 1964, I found myself kneeling beside Lord Snowdon on the banks of the Regent’s Canal painting grey stones black. It was a bizarre but appropriate introduction to working with Cedric Price, who often turned to Lewis Carroll to make a point. Snowdon had sourced black slate from a Welsh quarry on a Crown estate to line the ground inside the new Aviary1 at the London Zoo, but there was a shortfall in coverage, and the Aviary was about to open. Hence the paint. The Aviary [2] was a major hinge point in Cedric’s career, and in his development as an architect. Before its completion, his projects and completed work had been relatively minor in scale, though always beautifully detailed, and highly imaginative in their development of flexible, interlinked spaces. Cedric Price: ever exchanging ideas, jokes and information – in a word, learning There was work for a London hotel, the Robert Fraser Gallery in There were two notable Cedric greatly admired. The other Mayfair, and a clutch of houses, exceptions. The timber-framed (unbuilt) project was the only one of which, the children’s pavilion in a garden at auditorium at Claverton, where gamekeeper’s cottage at High Leigh, Worthing was the first example of Cedric collaborated with got off the ground. These were all of what Cedric would later describe as Buckminster Fuller to develop his conventional masonry or concrete ‘additive detailing’, where planted geodesic radome system as a shelter construction, though scarcely components were used rather than for concerts. Cedric solved the old conventional for the time in their conventional joints, much in the riddle of how you get into a dome built form. manner of Walter Segal, whom without compromising its obituary arq . vol 7 . no 2 . 2003 113 114 arq . vol 7 . no 2 . 2003 obituary by Joan in (characteristically) New Scientist and major splash coverage in (uncharacteristically) the January preview issue of The Architectural Review. A formidable fund-raising committee, including Buckminster Fuller, Yehudi Menuhin, Ritchie Calder and Lord Harewood was in place, and a vacant site had been found at Mill Meads, at the bottom end of the new Lea Valley Park in East London. The roll call of the Fun Palace Trust was a typical cross- section through Cedric’s increasingly heterogeneous network of friends, acquaintances, information sources and specialist advisers, ranging from movers and shakers through the knowledgeable and the raffish to, occasionally, the 2 London Zoo Aviary, 1961: an engineering triumph and a public success downright sinister.8 And then there was Joan Littlewood, who could structural and visual integrity with talent. Anthony Armstrong-Jones effortlessly combine all such roles a single sweep of Occam’s Razor: he had been a friend and contemporary at once, if need be. jacked it up for the audience to get at Cambridge. When, as Lord in, then dropped it for the Snowdon, he was approached by the Learning and other delights performance.2 Zoo to build a ‘birdcage’,4 he came Up to the White Room9 on the top All this work flowed from the to Cedric for help, in a classic floor of the new offices in Alfred foundation of Cedric Price demonstration of one of Cedric’s Place trooped, over the next 30-odd Architects in 1960. Prior to that he many famous aphorisms: ‘A client years, cyberneticians like Gordon had worked for Fry Drew and is somebody who comes to you in Pask and Stafford Beer; a constant Partners, and collaborated with state of distress’. stream of students; politicians Erno Goldfinger on exhibition Bringing in the equally young from every political persuasion, design, while also working as a engineer Frank Newby of Samuely’s, from Ian Mikardo, Tom Driberg and part-time tutor at the Architectural Cedric then proceeded to make life Ellis Hillman10 to Alastair McAlpine; Association school, a post he held as difficult as possible for the experts in perception like Richard until 1964. Cedric had completed design team, persuading the Zoo to Gregory; fellow practitioners like his last two years’ training at the swap a flat site for the steeply Ron Herron, Per Kardtvet and David AA, after reading architecture at sloping canal bank, so as to allow Allford; writers and critics like Cambridge from 1952 to 1955. view of the birds from above, below Peter Banham, Studs Terkel, Paul One year into the course there, his and from the side. There were other Barker, and Paul Finch; academics father died, leaving Cedric, the problems to be overcome: the like Peter Cowan and Peter Hall; and elder son, as the effective head of spacing of the aluminium mesh TUC heavyweights like Clive Jenkins the family. had to be small enough to keep and Norman Willis; all with one His father, the architect A.J.Price, food-hungry birds out, yet large aim: to exchange ideas, jokes and was a major influence on Cedric’s enough to prevent icing up and a information – in a word, learning. interests. He had worked with subsequent increase in wind load.5 Learning – not ‘education’ – was Harry Weedon pre-war on the And the corrosive qualities of bird what the Fun Palace [3 and 4] was all Odeon cinema chain, and after the excrement caused considerable about. A huge, enormously flexible war on housing, two areas of pain when it came to specifying the ‘university of the streets’ (Joan’s preoccupation to which Cedric was materials used in the interior.6 words), its basilica plan form to return again and again But the result was an engineering mirrored that of those other great throughout his life. Equally triumph and an instant success centres of information exchange, important, Cedric grew up with the public. With its four the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. surrounded by technical manuals, floating aluminium tetrahedra, Only here there was no vault, but a for which he had an abiding cable-supported from V-shaped series of folding rainscreens; no fascination.3 And his father’s tragic compression members at each end, aisle chapels, but a range of early death undoubtedly helped it was the first major tensegrity moveable floors; no echoing void to shape the resilience and survival structure in the UK. In its visual the nave, but a myriad secondary instinct which was to support him permeability it echoed the enclosures slung from the trussed throughout his career. comment about glass by Cedric’s ‘roof’ structure, moved around by a old mentor at the AA, Arthur Korn: travelling gantry, and serviced by An instant public success ‘es ist da, und es ist nicht da’. mobile escalators, and lifts and air- The fledgling practice that he had With the Aviary under its belt the handling equipment in the skeletal established was stabilized and office was heavily engaged on two ‘columns’. supported by the Aviary commission. very different yet interlinked The Fun Palace pushed 1960s This had come his way by a process projects. Cedric had been brewing up technology to its very limit, egged that was to become an established the Fun Palace since 1961 with Joan on by its client. ‘What time is it?’ feature of his career: a fruitful Littlewood,7 and by 1964 it was just she wrote,11 ‘Any time of day or combination of networking and about to go public, with an article night, winter or summer – it obituary arq . vol 7 . no 2 . 2003 115 interventions, like Thinkgrid, Magnet, Generator and the South Bank study, which Cedric was to propose over the next 30 odd years to ‘tune’ cities so that they could respond immediately to the requirements of their inhabitants. Perhaps inevitably, the Pilot Project was scuppered by a small but determined band of protesters, led by the local Vicar who claimed, among other things, that it would ‘take people away from the Church’. 3 Fun Palace: an enormously flexible ‘university of the streets’, 1961 Ironically, the nearest equivalent to the Project to be built, the Inter- Action Centre of 1971 [5], was to rise on a site very nearby. Midway in scale between the Main and Pilot Projects, its lattice steel structure formed the frame for a variety of enclosures, ranging from Portakabins and log cabins to purpose-built rehearsal rooms. Its aesthetic – and, make no mistake, it did have a very strong aesthetic, as did all Cedric’s built and unbuilt projects – was at once casual, accretive and highly descriptive of the functional organization which underlay its form. There are direct parallels here with the disposition of components of the Potteries Thinkbelt, which the office was developing in parallel with the Fun Palace, though the scale of the 1 Thinkbelt – a triangle 4 ⁄2 miles by 7 miles by 8 miles – was vast by comparison. 4 Helicopter arriving at the Fun Palace by night doesn’t really matter. If it’s too wet that roof will stop the rain but not the light. The artificial cloud will keep you cool or make rainbows for you. Your feet will be warm as you watch the stars – the atmosphere clear as you join in the chorus.’ But it was technically feasible – just.
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